[Foundation-l] The status of smaller languages on the Wikimedia Commons

Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen at gmail.com
Thu May 4 14:28:00 UTC 2006


Paweł Dembowski wrote:
> GerardM napisału:
>
>   
>> Hoi,
>> This seems to be yet another fine mess that the Commons crowd is
>> getting itself into. The question is when will they learn that they
>> are serving the other projects and that their good intentions have
>> resulted in projects NOT adopting Commons because of the fiendly
>> cooperation as it is perceived.
>>     
>
>   
>> What do they think they achieve by doing this? Is this in the interest
>> of the projects? Is this the considered opinion of the Commons
>> community or is it a solitary excercise? It is indeed a great way of
>> creating more hostility.
>>     
>
>   
>> Thanks,
>>     GerardM
>>     
>
> It was a solitary decision by Arnomane. He does raise a good point -
> "it does harm severely the up to date localised pages if you need to
> search them between lots of other links, others are still accessible
> directly" - there is a link to "other languages" at the end of the
> language list, so nothing is lost, really, just made less prominent,
> although I think that making the links to more up-to-date languages bigger
> and the other ones smaller would probably be a better idea.
Hoi,
Does it really ? When you are looking for information, and you are 
looking for it in your language, you do not care if the information is 
correct in Dutch Farsi Russian Chinese German or French when you do not 
read those languages. When you insist on making some languages less 
prominent, by inference the people who use these languages are less 
prominent. There is a word for it ..

It is abundantly true that we need better support for the localisation 
of our project and of our software. There is a subcommittee that deals 
with communication and translation. I am sure that they were consulted 
before these punitive measures were enacted.

Thanks,
   GerardM



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